By JUDY SLOANE
Front Row Features
HOLLYWOOD-With its fourth and final season, it’s time to say goodbye to Hallmark’s successful time-travel series “The Way Home,” which spotlights the tense relationships between three generations of the Landry family; grandmother, Del (Andie MacDowall), her daughter, Kat (Chyler Leigh) and granddaughter, Alice (Sadie Laflamme-Snow), now living together at Del’s Canadian farm in New Haven, New Brunswick, where a pond on the property serves to be an unexpected and healing catalyst.
The fourth season premieres on the Hallmark Channel on Sunday, April 19, 2026, at 9 ET/PT, streaming the next day on Hallmark+. The TV Critics Association spoke with one of the creators and executive producers of the show, Alexandra Clarke, and the series star, Andie MacDowall, about the end of the Landry saga.
Q: Alexandra, I think a lot of fans were surprised and distraught when they found out the show was going to be ending. Can you talk about what drove the decision to end the show with Season 4?
Alexandra Clarke: I think every season of a show, you go into it knowing it’s a gift and that this could be the last. We knew fairly early on that this was the direction that we were gonna go this season, and it’s a daunting task to be in that writers’ room and realize you have to dot all the I’s and cross all the T’s.
To face this season knowing it was probably the end was bittersweet, but we all rallied together.
Q: Will the final season explain why only the Landry family can use the pond and time-travel, or will that be left for us to ‘ponder’ forever?
Alexandra Clarke: I think we certainly can promise that we will be delving more into the lore of this pond, and a bit more of the origin stories of that lore.
At the end of the day, time-travel in our show is not just for the sake of time- travel. Isn’t that cool and let’s dissect everything about it. But it’s a tool for healing. It’s a means to an end; it’s not the end. I think to dissect it down to its minutiae would take up precious screen time that we usually don’t have [and] ruin the message, which is this is to let you heal.
Q: Can you tease if we have any surprise pond jumpers this season? Anybody we didn’t expect to time-travel or have time-traveled that we will find out did?
Alexandra Clarke: Yeah. We’re gonna go out with a bang. We can definitely guarantee that.
Q: Andie, you were one of the first big stars to do a Hallmark show. What convinced you that this was going to be the series to do?
Andie MacDowell: It was a choice for me because I have so many people, friends and family, that are huge fans of Hallmark. The material is always something that is comforting and in a general sense, it’s wholesome. You rarely see terrible things happen that are really disturbing. It’s a safe place. I was excited to work with them.
To have done this show has been amazing, because this was a unique step for Hallmark. [It’s] their first television series that really broke down some boundaries for them, [taking] a chance to do something a little bit juicier and have some darker moments. I felt very privileged to have worked with these wonderful actors, these great creators, and to have been a part of that journey.
Q: When you first read the pilot for this, what was your reaction to the concept overall? And given that Del is now a more direct part of the time-travel element, how do you feel about her arc?
Andie MacDowell: I don’t think I really knew what I was jumping into. But I loved the idea of the character, the matriarch. I had it in my head that that’s really something that I wanted to experience and show other mature women that they can be this strong, dynamic woman. And I loved the concept of the farm. I’m big into bees and organic farming.
[It’s] interesting to get to play a character that long and have these really strong feelings about who I was and how I was being created, because I felt like I knew Del intimately. That was a beautiful experience.
Q: Is there anything you would like to see for Del this last season?
Andie MacDowell: For me character-wise, I would like to see some of the rough edges softened. I feel like Del has had such a load on her shoulders, she didn’t have any parents around. She doesn’t have anybody taking care of her, she didn’t have a man. And she had so much loss. I think it would be nice to see that she has hope for herself as an individual, not someone who’s having to take care of her farm or other people.
